Or at least, that should have been the case, yet that small existence remained unaffected before his dignified gaze.
In fact, the small existence was even looking down at him and giving him a thorough verbal smackdown.
“Raw garbage that can’t be used, and it doesn’t even look like you’d be useful as fertilizer.”
“Ah…”
The boy shook his head as though he found the lich hopeless, then grabbed the princess by her head and dragged her along as he leisurely approached the Undead King.
However, he did not look like he was about to hand her over and beg for his life.
“…Boy, if you hand me the princess, I will let your insolence pass.”
The lich lord just inwardly scoffed at the boy’s rude remarks, thinking to himself that it was the boy who was useless, but he didn’t feel like it was worth the effort to dispose of him, so he just let his insolence pass and said that.
But…
“Shut up, you scrap of bones worth even less than maggots. Don’t tell me what to do like a human would when you’re not even a living creature.”
The boy just laughed scornfully in the face of his mercy.
Not a hint of false bravado could be seen on his face.
What a sad thing, the Undead King thought with a sigh.
“Sigh, people like this occasionally appear. That’s why short-lived people are so troublesome. He’s so tiny that he can’t even notice the difference in strength or existence. How pitiful.”
Though everyone knew that the sun shone high up in the sky, only a few knew that it was a mass of fire that would burn any living creature before they could even approach it.
The bugs that crawled on the ground could not understand what it meant to fear his brilliance.
So he gave the order to his skeleton dog to dispose of the boy.
Three dogs should make short work of him.
“!”
“────Crush them, Gravity(Ga Gorga).”
Someone let out an anguished voice, but it was muffled by that powerful chant, and the skeleton dogs that attacked were crushed mid-stride.
It was as if they had been crushed by the hands of some invisible giant, leaving behind only a white object the size of a pebble. But even those fell on the ground and broke up as they rolled away.
“…W-What was that just now? This presence… Magic? Impossible! They might have been lower-class monster beasts, but I’ve already turned them into my skeletons!”
The lich lord was so shocked that he was stupefied for a moment, then he lost his composure.
Impossible, he yelled. After all, an undead had just been crushed by magic.
Perhaps a huge spell that could alter the terrain could indeed kill an undead, but the spell cast just now was so subtle he wasn’t even sure what happened.
“What attribute even is that spell called Gagorga!?”
Above all, the Undead King couldn’t understand the word that the boy uttered.
That took the boy by surprise and despite his irritation, the boy became dumbfounded and blinked his eyes, then he said.
“Come on, now. You’ve been undying for 300 years, and you don’t know? …The maid over there, explain.”
The boy pointed at the maid closest to him. It was the maid with wounds all over and had drooping eyes. And though she was the closest to him, she was still at least 20 steps away.
She was surprised by his sudden command, and for some reason, she appeared scared of him, but she still complied and quickly explained.
“E-Erm… G-Ga Gorga is a gravity spell. It can make objects float or crush them with an invisible force. Magic indeed struggles against the undead, but a low-level existence can still be crushed along with its vessel if the power is strong enough. Ga Gorga is really difficult to control compared to other spells, so it’s usually kept hidden, but it is often described in high-level magic books.”
“───You heard her. You have so much time, and yet you didn’t even know that? Even laziness ought to have a limit. Just what have you been studying this whole time?”
The boy laughed as he mocked the creature that was clearly not human.
Even the maid that explained the spell treated the Undead King like air and only looked at the boy with fear and awe.
It was a humiliation.
The Undead King had spent the past centuries in pursuit of knowledge and magic, yet some humans only a decade or two old actually dared to mock and ignore him.
This was unacceptable.
Someone who pursued the taboo, a symbol of fear, could not possibly accept such treatment.
“People with loose lips don’t live long, boy.”
The Undead King suppressed his anger and implicitly told the boy in front of him to die as his bony fingers pointed at him.
A sinister light gathered at the tip of his fingers, then shot out in a streak of light.
That ray of light moved straight for the boy’s heart at the speed of light.
But the boy just continued to leisurely speak.
“By the way───”
“Gu!?”
What? The Undead King thought as something shot through his shoulders.
His trembling consciousness reflexively pushed down on his perforated shoulder, while his rational consciousness analyzed what had transpired and was shocked.
“Impossible…”
The cursed light he’d shot out hit something when it was right in front of the boy and came shooting back at him like a ray of light hitting a mirror.
“───I can deflect attacks like this too. And what was up with that Cursed Light just now? It’s still fine if you thought you could kill me with just something on that level, but if that was your full strength, then I really gotta ask, just what have you been doing with your life?”
At first, the boy seemed to be just messing around, but now he was seriously mocking him, and the Undead King could only grit his teeth while he pressed down on the hole that wouldn’t close.
The boy took that for his answer and narrowed his eyes as he looked around them.
“Your skeletons are poorly made too. You must’ve used that. The purple smoke that leads to death(Deathly Smoke), a low-class necromancy spell. But there’s still some flesh left, and some of the night dogs are chewing on their bones. Control, precision… You suck at everything, don’t you? I give you failing marks. Seriously, what did you live the last three hundred years for?”
“D-Damn you! You’re just a little brat, so why do you know so much!?”
The boy clearly knew a lot. He could even tell what the original monster beasts were just from the bones, and he could even judge the precision of his technique.
To top it all off, he gave him failing marks. The Undead King gnashed his molars.
Had he still some flesh on his face, his expression right now would have surely been filled with humiliation.
“But then again, you’re just a coward who couldn’t endure being human and ran away. Becoming undead won’t change who you are────Gulde Tolpunte-kun.”
The boy’s face couldn’t be more common, but it was on such a face that a crescent moon smile surfaced.
“───!? You… Where did you hear that name?”
That was an impossible sequence of words. Unlike anything until now, this was not something that one could learn just by studying.
In the Undead King’s surprise, his empty head seethed.
This boy clearly knew what he abandoned and erased 300 years ago. He couldn’t allow this boy to speak any more than this.
He buried everything when he became undead, so why now?
But while he knew he had to shut the boy up, he had to first know where he learned of him.
While the Undead King was in a dilemma, the boy spoke of those things that he shouldn’t speak.
“You are the third son of Tolpunte family, a noble family from a kingdom of long ago. In your childhood, you studied to become the strength of the 1st and 2nd sons, but along the way, you became obsessed with knowledge and the means to an end became the end itself. Before long, you found the shackles of society and living creatures to be a hindrance, so you turned to the taboo and the dark arts and became an undead… Did I get it right, Gulde-kun?”
The boy said with a crescent moon smile and a pair of mocking eyes.